The party’s rapid early growth seemed to confirm the
premise on which it was founded — tens of thousands of France's workers and
young people wanted to get active against capitalism’s crises and crimes, but were
wary of existing left organisations and looking for a new sort of political
home.

However, after the NPA membership peaked at just under
10,000 (the LCR membership had rarely exceeded 2500), it soon went into decline.
By its second congress, held on February 1-3 in the
working-class Paris
suburb of St Denis, NPA membership was being put at between 2000 and 2500.

The NPA’s 1.15% vote in 2012’s presidential poll also
saw its state electoral funding collapse
compared to the 2002 and 2007 LCR presidential campaigns in which popular
candidate Olivier Besancenot won more than
4%. LCR and NPA leader Alain Krivine
told the February 1 Líbération, “The
state of our finances is pretty catastrophic.”

At that point GA became the third grouping sucked out
of the NPA by the gravitational pull of the Left Front, which had begun in late
2008 as a coalition between the Left
Party (Parti de Gauche, PG) and the Communist Party of France (PCF) for the
2009 European election. In the May 2012 presidential
poll the Left Front’s leading personality, former Socialist Party (SP) left tendency leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, won 11.1% (nearly 4 million votes) on a
program of a “citizens’
revolution” against neoliberal capitalism.

Diagnoses

The NPA pre-congress discussion and congress debate
was haunted by these developments and by the spectre of the rising Left Front,
now involving nine left organisations. What had gone wrong? The four party platforms (named
W, X, Y and Z) seeking support from congress delegates put forward different diagnoses
and treatments.

Platform Y, which won 31.9% support in the
pre-congress vote in the NPA’s branches, noted that “the NPA was formed on the
assumption that there was nothing substantial between itself and the SP, and
that as a result it could by itself embody the alternative to the social-liberalism.
But at the very same time, the political landscape changed substantially with
the appearance of the PG and the Left Front.”

However, that didn’t mean the NPA was doomed to crisis
by the very appearance of a new rival. “The NPA should have had its centre of
gravity in struggles … but the opposite happened: under the political pressure
of the Left Front the core concerns of the leadership and of our debates were
focused on electoral-political alliances.”

The result, according to platform Y, was that a false argument
grew that social victories would not be possible in the absence of a credible political
alternative to the social liberalism of President François Hollande and the Socialist
Party government. Advocated by GA, this argument led to its desertion to the
Left Front and “a renunciation of what should have been an essential aspect of
our program but which we sometimes had a tendency to forget: there will be no
electoral short cut to the liberation of the workers.”

A second result was the neglect of “the priorities
decided by the founding congress (workplaces, youth, working-class neighbourhoods).
In general issues of party building have been totally neglected by successive
national leaderships. Many comrades’ feeling of alienation is largely due to
this problem: below, concrete activist work done as best as can be managed; on
high, ‘leaders’ discussing in a vacuum, orienting nothing and not helping the
intervention.”

In the opening congress session that covered the
balance sheet of the NPA’s last two years, the presenter for majority Platform
X (which had won 51% support in the pre-congress branch vote) acknowledged that
the departure of GA had been “a serious blow that has left our leadership
weakened”.

However, the underlying cause of the NPA’s problems
had been objective, the decline in the level of social struggle, and not
everything, moreover, had been black: the party had pulled together for candidate
Phillipe Poutou’s presidential election campaign and it had reached its finance
campaign target.

What was undeniable despite all difficulties was that
the NPA needed to exist, because “the Left Front doesn’t organise opposition to the government” and
because of a number of
Left Front positions, such as only opposing “stock-exchange sackings” (sackings
done by companies still making profits and paying shareholder dividends), not
sackings in general.

Its main component, the PCF, continued to support the
French military intervention in Mali, collaborated with the SP in local and
regional governments, and was wedded to nuclear energy.

Platforms X and Y were agreed on how to characterise the
Left Front. Their joint text read: “We are seeing the emergence of a new
anti-neoliberal reformist movement. This phenomenon, which has appeared in
other countries in Europe, is criss-crossed with contradictions. The grassroots
look for an alternative to the government and to austerity, while the policy of
the leadership is largely determined by positions held in the trade union
apparatuses and by the thousands elected to positions in the institutions.”

Differences within the Left Front were described as
ranging from “the leadership of the PCF which refuses to clearly take a stand
in opposition to the government, passing through the PG and Mélenchon, who come
out against the state budget but decline confrontation with the employers and
government, through to minority currents who support the building of a Left
Front-based social and political front against government policy.”

NPA
‘unborn’

Platform Z (9% support in the branch vote) described
the Left Front still more harshly as a roadblock to struggle (“the leaders of
the Left Front play the same role as their union alter egos”) and as a point of
support to the SP government.

The Left Front hardly featured in the thinking of Platform
W (8.2% branch support): for it the key problem was that the NPA had “still to
be founded”. It had failed to live up to its initial appeal because its political
culture continued to be dominated by the regime of permanent tendency and
“professional leadership” inherited from the LCR.

Calling for end to the culture of “posing debates from
on high”, where the platforms divide up the entire speaking time and decide
speakers, Platform W said: “It is high time to really take seriously the
heterogeneity of the activists who joined the NPA and their differing attitudes
to activism, with the goal of equipping ourselves with the capacity to think
out how to structure the pace of activism in such a way that everyone feels
involved.”

Platform W added: “It is high time to really take
seriously the willingness to ‘do politics differently’ of all those who
responded to the [original] appeal of the NPA.”

At the opening of the congress Platform W proposed a
change in the agenda to allow more workshops at the expense of plenary debate
between the platforms, but lost.

All four platforms agreed on one thing — that the
place of the NPA was outside the Left Front. However, the opposite diagnosis
was still present at the congress in the form of greetings from GA (which
continues to have some members in the NPA).

The GA greetings said that the Left Front’s “taking distance
from the SP/Greens in power and affirmation of its opposition to all austerity
policies have been confirmed at national and European levels. Moreover, we
judge that this trend will strengthen further as social liberal policy is
increasingly applied. In the context of the balance of forces of which we are
aware and which you analyse in your texts, the regroupment of all forces
pushing for independence from the SP is a necessity.”

The GA greetings added: “We are not unaware of the
obstacles and differences within the Left Front, which is why we have also
worked for the regroupment of the anti-capitalist and eco-socialist forces
inside it. We consider that our inherited shared principles — of class struggle,
anti-capitalism and the conviction that the solution cannot only be at the
level of institutions — are preserved within the Left Front.”

As for the NPA’s own line, “unfortunately, it seems
that you have not only ruled out that specific option, but even the possibility
of such a front in the future. It must be hoped that this doesn’t mean a choice
of systematic, long-term political isolation, comparable to that of [far left
coalition] Antarsya in Greece, very distant from the needs of the day.”

Treatments

Platforms X and Y drew different practical conclusions
from their shared description of the Left Front.

Platform Y, prioritising a turn to building the NPA in
the workplace and the social movements, envisaged an engagement “with the
components parts of the Left Front, pointing to the contradictions in their
politics”. Anything else would “leave the impression that we could envisage
building a ‘political alternative’ with the Left Front and that that would be
the basis for again bringing hope to our social camp.”

By contrast, Platform X said that “the urgent issue
today is that of building a left opposition to the government that [also]
fights the right and the extreme right who are trying to lead popular
dissatisfaction astray all the better to stifle it. We address all
organisations of the workers’ movement who are not taking part in the
government so as to be able to act together in this direction, posing the
question of the political alternative needed to get out of the crisis, an
anti-austerity government that cannot emerge from parliamentary agreements
above and beyond power relations imposed through struggles.”

Platform X did not rule out possible alliances with
the Left Front, but instead outlined what an “anti-austerity government” would
have to undertake, covering an “anti-capitalist tax system”, expropriation of
the banks in order to put credit issuance in public hands, “socialisation of
the big industrial groups”, a ban on all sackings, a citizen’s debt audit with
a view to refusing debt repayment, and an emergency plan to end France’s
nuclear energy dependence.

Platform Z called for the “openly revolutionary refounding”
of the NPA, while Platform W advanced a three-point project of making the party
“an inclusive space”, allowing the networking of different struggles and “working
out together of our sketch of a future world”.

Decisions

The final sessions of the congress were closed to
observers, but its results, including the assessments of the four platforms,
have been published on the NPA website. According to this report, Platform X’s
perspective won with 55.9% support and a number of statute changes and
organisational decisions were adopted that limit time in elected positions,
provide for a national meeting of campaign committees and allow regional observers
to attend national leadership meetings.

A resolution on increasing the NPA’s feminist
orientation and a plan for building the party in the next period, developed
jointly by delegates from platforms W and X, were overwhelmingly adopted.

The platforms made the following assessment of the
congress:

Platform W: “We hope it marks a halt to our internal
crisis and the chance for a new start: the taking of ownership of the party by
its whole membership and the chance to turn outwards.”

Platform X: “The aspiration for convergence was
broadly voiced but it ran up against factional attitudes and also against
political misunderstandings and disagreements that will now have to be overcome
in practice.”

Platform Y: “The slight majority did not draw the
lessons of the causes of the NPA’s crisis. It readopted the policy of a
permanent social and political front with the Left Front supported in its day
by GA:”

Platform Z: “The outgoing leadership has won a slight
majority on the basis of a text that prepares the conditions for a worsening of
the crisis… The formulae that [Platform X] proposes opens the way to a ‘left
government’ with the reformists and anti-neoliberals in the framework of the
institutions of capitalism.”

The issues thrown up at this NPA congress, which ended
without an agreed communiqué, were never going to be settled by the congress
itself. They regard the most basic question of the pathway to power for the social
majority in the advanced capitalist countries, including the social
mobilisations, forms of political organisation, policy of alliances and kind of
government needed to drive the process forward.

The fact that delegates for different platforms drew
on the example of the Greek radical left party Syriza to back contradictory positions
was eloquent as to the issues that remain unresolved in the NPA.

Meanwhile, the Left Front has not been idle. On
January 21 its coordinating committee unanimously adopted a plan to strengthen
the front as a campaigning organisation, to be followed by January 23 rally in
Metz to launch its 2013 “Alternative to Austerity” campaign.

The NPA’s difficult wrestle with its orientation
towards the Left Front seems bound to continue.